Featured image Martin Heigan/Flickr CC BY NC ND 2.0
Thanks to technology, we have access to stuff beyond our wildest imaginations, but that can also make our life more difficult. How can we best handle these super wide horizons?
In the olden days, we could see little further than the corner of our street. There were a few national or regional radio stations, and some national TV stations that filtered international news and broadcast principally locally produced material, complemented with mostly English and American series. If we wanted to buy a book or a CD, we went to the store and checked what they had on their shelves; if we wanted to meet people, we went to the pub or joined a club or society where we would find likeminded individuals.
Our horizon was limited, and to discover something novel, or to make new friends we could only explore the small, local pond we were swimming in. Now, borders and distances are no longer constraining us. We have access to countless radio stations, on-demand video, books, musical artists and people who share our interests, many orders of magnitude larger than we imagined possible. Our horizon has become so wide that we risk being completely overwhelmed. How can we make sure we don’t end up the victim of abundance?
Overload
The challenge of choice overload is a well-known phenomenon (I also wrote about it here). Intuitively, having more options to choose from would seem to be better than having fewer. In practice, however, it depends. 20 years ago, Barry Schwarz described a classic experiment on this subject in his book The Paradox of Choice. Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper offered shoppers in a supermarket a promotion on a range of either six, or 24 different jams. They found that more people took up the offer and actually bought the product when only six jams were presented, and that buyers in this condition were more pleased with their choice than in the 24 jams condition. However, later meta-analytic research (joint analyses of multiple studies) provided important nuance: Benjamin Scheibehenne and colleagues found a mean effect size of close to zero, albeit with a large variation, suggesting that the number of options is not the only thing that influences our behaviour. Alexander Chernev and colleagues identified specific factors that influence the degree to which people experience overload (complexity of the choice set, difficulty of the decision task, uncertainty about preferences and the actual goal of the decision). This explains why, for instance, we are not at all fazed by the typical menu of a Chinese or Indian takeaway, with usually well over 100 options – these are neatly organized in a way that helps us quickly eliminate what we are not interested in. And as Rory Sutherland once said, “If you’ve driven 27 miles to visit a place called World of Jam, you’re probably not going to walk in and go ‘Oh Jesus! There’s just too much jam.’”
Still, when the number of options increases by orders of magnitude, there can be detrimental consequences that do not depend on the context. Imagine you’re getting into podcasts, and you’re looking to identify some good-to-excellent ones to listen to while you’re working out. You plan to sample some in the next twelve weeks, picking one at random every week. Let us consider two situations: one in which the total number of podcasts on the topics you’re interested in is 24, and one in which it is ten times higher. In both situations, the quality distribution of podcasts is the same: 1 in every 8 are excellent, 1 in 4 are good, 10 in 24 are mediocre and 5 in 24 are terrible. What is the chance that, in your twelve-week period you would fail to find any of the excellent podcasts? When there are only 24 to choose from, it is about 11%. When there are 10 times more, counterintuitively, failing to find a single excellent one is almost twice as likely (19%). Similarly, the chance that you will find at least one excellent and one good podcast in your sample of twelve is close to 90% if there are only 24 to consider, but only just under 73% when there are 240.
Rethinking how to choose
It is easier to find the two good options in a set of ten, than to find two good options in a set of 100, even if it contains 20 suitable ones: instead of just eight unsuitable ones, in the latter there are 80. The proportion of suitable items, whatever category you’re looking at, is almost always relatively low. So, as the number of options increases, you will need to reject ever more of them, as philosopher Stefan Schubert recently observedin a tweet. Instead of about three radio networks that, collectively, produced a handful of hours of the music I was into when I was a whippersnapper, I can now listen to dozens of stations broadcasting exactly the kind of music I want, every waking hour and more. But these few dozens of stations are buried among more than 60,000 stations. Picking the very best ones thus becomes a colossal task.
But is that what I really want? When the very best options are, technically at least, abundantly available and just a click away, the temptation to be continually looking for them is real. The fear of missing out on something that I am unaware of – whether it is a radio station, a book, a blog, an artist on Spotify, yet another cool person to follow on Twitter or BlueSky – is ready and waiting to pounce if I am not careful. In the past, the supply of interesting stuff was usually well below what we wanted. Now, it is our capacity to handle the supply that is the limiting factor.
This points towards a possible strategy to avoid being crushed by the innumerable possibilities of an unfeasibly wide horizon. There is no way that we can possibly read all the books, listen to all the albums, visit all the blogs and so on that are available. Maybe there are domains in our life where we really want the very best, and then we should find the most efficient strategy to achieve it – for example, study the subject matter, or tap into the recommendations of experts – to find our way in the abundance.
But for anything else, how about turning the framing upside down? Instead of measuring our success by what percentage of what we would, or could do, we have actually done, and strive for that elusive 100%, what if we looked at it from the viewpoint of what we will never do? No matter what, there will be hundreds, if not thousands of books we will never read, of places we will never visit, of songs we will never hear, of people we will never meet, because we will never even know that they exist. One more or less is not going to make the slightest dent in that. So, why worry about it?
We could choose to treat the plenitude of an incredibly wide horizon not as an obligation to pursue as many opportunities as we humanly can, but as a store of possibilities that are available to us should we wish. This is where a concept that Herbert Simon, the renowned polymath, called satisficing can serve us much better than optimizing: stop searching when some acceptability threshold is met. If we focus less on the elusive best things we might be missing out on, and more on the good things we can and do enjoy, we are making the best of these wonderful times of plenty. Focus on good, focus on better or different, but resist the seduction of the best.
Koenfucius 